The quickest way to setup SiteMesh is to import sitemesh-blank.war into your development environment or server.
Having said that, manually setting up SiteMesh is also a very straightforward process. These steps are also useful for setting up SiteMesh on an existing Web Application.
tip}If you are using technology older than 2009 you should verify that your environment meets the SiteMesh requirements.
Completely Newbie
If you are a complete newbie to Java Web Application Development you should here is list of topics that you might want to Google before starting,
- What is an Java Application Server
- How to Setup the Eclipse with Tomcat
- How to Setup a Default Web Application
Install SiteMesh Manually
Manually installing SiteMesh into your web application consists of three steps,
- Add the SiteMesh library file to WEB-INF/lib
- Add the SiteMesh filter to web.xml
- Create a blank decorators.xml file
Setup Library File
Copy the SiteMesh jar file into your web application's WEB-INF/lib directory. In this example we downloaded SiteMesh 2.4.1 which uses the jar name, sitemesh-2.4.1.jar.
Add SiteMesh Filter
Add the following to WEB-INF/web.xml within the <web-app> tag,
Create the a decorators.xml file in your WEB-INF directory,
If you start up your application server (container) At this stage, SiteMesh is ready to go. However, SiteMesh will not do anything yet.